A Philosophical Look at Climate Change
… And why its here to stay
Disclaimer: This article is about 2 years old and written for the university magazine.
In 2019, Greta Thunberg said “how dare you” and she was right, how dare we! But now we have to dare to reverse this climate change and it may still be an improbable task. Because for all the protests and the media attention that ‘Fridays for Future’ has been getting, there is not much action on the ground where it matters. There are many reasons for this, most of which can be traced back to the opportunism that has been hardwired into our brains.
Humans try to accrue the most beneficial of opportunities, and if none are forthcoming, they will take the easiest way out. The Amazon fires started because of people burning their farms and dashing. They did not have an economic opportunity (read, incentive) or knowledge to try other methods and ‘burn and dash’ was the easiest one available. Urbanization happens because the rural people think that there are a plethora of opportunities in the cities while they cannot find one in their villages. In the past, low opportunity for infants to live beyond infancy resulted in a higher birth rate. The earliest humans lived alongside rivers because opportunities for obtaining food and water were the highest there. If the world provided opportunities to girls as they do to boys, boys would not be pined for and female infanticide would end.
Human beings as a species are intelligent but not responsible. Instead of using our intelligence to exist blissfully with Nature and all its life forms, we use it to keep generating new opportunities for ourselves. What’s more is a human tends to see opportunities as being present only for himself and has to make a conscious effort to realize how that same opportunity can benefit someone else. This is how narrow-minded and opportunistic we are. There was a time when humans used to coexist with Nature (when human survival depended on it), but once they could generate opportunities on their own, they left caring for it. This effectively happened after the Industrial Revolution.
Post-Industrial Revolution, we have only increased the intensity with which we harm Nature. This makes the challenge of reversing the climate crisis very severe. Research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that the greenhouse gas emissions that have long been held (and proven) as the major cause for warming our planet and accelerating climate change will need to be cut to net zero in every sector within 50 years, the efforts for which need to be started within 10 years. The research also gives a breakup of the major sources of these emissions: electricity generation is 25%, manufacturing is 21% and transportation is 14%. This means that within 10 years, we need to be on the way to using only solar and wind power for generating electricity and even this will only account for a quarter of the emissions; we need to more or less start manufacturing products like plastic, cement and steel by pre-Industrial Revolution methods (if that is even possible) and the hype around electric vehicles is not going to amount to much. Add to this that the climate cycle is always late to react so we do not know when the climate had latently reached the bad stage that has now manifested, and how much worse is yet to come.
Extrapolating the human opportunism to climate, the biggest hurdle apart from convincing 7.8 billion people that climate change is real will be to achieve international cooperation in living a life of net zero greenhouse emissions. This will be especially tough because at present, there are no fathomable opportunities to be accrued by living at net zero emissions, and without opportunities the status quo cannot be changed. Because technological circumstances to support net zero emissions have not yet arisen, the governments of the world cannot just enact laws to enforce it and in the process shut down existing industries wholly. People have a tendency to continue living life in the way they have been cultured and habituated to. That is why old people are resistant to change. Generations of humans have been cultured to the Modern Age, and a return to an era preceding it would prove an uphill task. Ask the people supporting Greta how many of them would be willing to abandon their modern lives!
Time does not move backwards, always forwards. What has been done, has been done; there is no going back to what it was. What we can hope for is that the worse that is yet to come from Nature is not much worse than the present and that the late reaction of climate has reached its end. What we can do is try our best to return to pre-Industrial Revolution conditions while also preserving our modern cultural, social and technological ethos in an attempt to realize climate restoration in the long term. It is a long road downhill but we have finally started noticing the steepness of it, and taken steps in the right direction. Let's all work to reach the bottom safely, together!
